tooltimes
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posted on December 6, 2002 10:02:08 AM new
The Krause SuperSeller bi-weekly newsletter email I got today mentioned the ebay's Half.com unit was removing all sportscards from it's site and recommended that seller's place the cards on the high traffic ebay site. That is probably nothing more than wishful thinking on ebay's part as most of those hundreds of thousands of cards are not even worth the thirty cent listing fee.
I can see Bidville picking up many of these soon-to-be-orphans auction warehouse items.
here's the article:
Auction Briefs
Trading cards moved off Half.com
Half.com users have been notified that the service will no longer accommodate sales of trading cards, effective Dec. 20.
"On eBay, you will find a stronger audience of buyers, and more flexibility in how you list your items. eBay's Trading Card categories averages more than $16 million in sales per month with more than 300,000 listings to choose from daily. We encourage you to move your inventory of trading cards from Half.com by December 20th and list them for sale on eBay," the notice said. Half.com is owned by eBay.
[ edited by tooltimes on Dec 6, 2002 10:02 AM ]
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blairwitch
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posted on December 6, 2002 11:04:09 AM new
I dont know tooltimes. With no off site advertising I would bet 8 out of 10 have no clue bidville exists. During the last bidville "sale" sport cards had the lowest sale rate of all items. For the most part any good cards will go to yahoo and the bay, while a few will make it to bidville.
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tooltimes
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posted on December 6, 2002 03:01:30 PM new
What are the options open to the Half sportscard warehousers?
I think many of them will park their cards at BV for the $10 a year membership fee or at least try it for a while at a lower membership fee. Some may try the epeir or Beckett sites too. None of the third tier sites really advertise so BV has a good chance to get some of the deposed Half sellers.
It does seem to show that the big site wants a listing fee and a small FVF rather than just a large FVF on a very small sale. It made no sense to try to only get a 10% commission on the very low end cards in the first place.
First the closing of Yahoo Used Goods ( Yahoo Warehouse ) and now the low end cards on Half. Things are shifting at the large venues.
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blairwitch
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posted on December 6, 2002 06:54:15 PM new
Tooltimes it isnt possible for a site to make much revenue on FVF's. Bidville's only option is the membership fee. Yahoo is a steal for a nickel, but for some reason sellers dont take advantage of it. Now its being reported that ebay will suspend sellers over the NPB refund. I look for ebay to stop refunding FVF's in time. They wont give the insertion fee money back on deadbeat sales.
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tooltimes
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posted on December 6, 2002 07:22:10 PM new
The possible ebay suspensions over any NPB's has always been there and is merely a hollow threat for the tiny percentage of sellers that aggresively threaten buyers with the NPB process for not paying for their win(s).
I hate to admit it but BV is doing the best that they can do with a bad situation. That situation being that the auction site is stuck with a huge majority of the items being low value items.
I can see BV trying to raise the verification fees one more time to $15 /yr unless a premimum membership is bought instead of course. Those premium memberships can backfire if the featuring and gallery advantages do not yield satisfactory results.
I recently calculated that BV may earn about $80,000 per year before expenses from the verification and membership dues. Even if there is only Bryan and Terry-the-Tech on site that is less than 40K/yr before expenses for each. That's better than the site making no money at all.
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blairwitch
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posted on December 7, 2002 10:23:25 AM new
Tooltimes you are correct about bidville. If they charged a 10% FVF there would be little revenue. $10.00 is cheap to warehouse thousands of items. I could see bidville charging a yearly $19.95 membership fee. That would be around $.40 per week.
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stavecards
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posted on December 17, 2002 08:16:37 AM new
Has anyone seen any other notice of this announcement other than the Krause newsletter? It seems odd that there is no notice of this on the announcement board at half.com.
This appears to be a curious move unless half.com is going to get rid of the everything else category. If the sole motivation was to remove the common card listings, they could have done this with a minimum price.
Another consideration for where these card listings may go? I wonder how many of them are already double listed. It would not surprise me if many of these half.com listings are also listed at Bidville and perhaps Beckett. On commons, not much chance of selling a particular card on more than one of the sites on the same day or even the same week.
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emak
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posted on December 17, 2002 11:38:27 AM new
Stave,
I used to bulk list my inventory at half.com via their FTP site, and I received an e-mail from them stating this a few weeks ago. I also am involved with a web site that had an arrangement to list their inventory on half.com also and that's where I first heard of this.
We were told a few months ago that a 75 cent listing minimum was going to be implemented, but it didn't look to me like it ever happened. Guess they just decided to pull the plug instead. I thought the original idea was good, and they certainly had the customer base to make it work I think. Part of the problem was a less-than-stellar database that you had to use in order to bulk list. They stopped updating it with new sets about mid-2001 so the handwriting has been there for a while.
Personally I didn't put the time into their site that I should have. I did fairly well there for the limited number of items I listed. I definitely received higher prices for items there than I did on ebay, even of the $10-$25 variety.
A site with a similar idea started a while back - Naxcom.com. It's an all sports site and it's fixed price. I love the site layout and their searches work well - they just need to reach out to a larger audience.
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tooltimes
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posted on December 17, 2002 12:22:04 PM new
One of the problems that Half is having may have to do with double listing, which in my opinion is more common that uncommon.
Many, many orders by Half sellers, and not just sportscard sellers, are either not confirmed or they are cancelled because the item is already sold. If you look at the special Half feedback ratings for Half sellers for average confirmation times and number of confirmed orders you'll see more and more unconfirmed orders. IMO, this is ruining Half's reputation as a reliable place to buy items. Half is doing what it has to in order try to improve the situation.
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stavecards
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posted on December 17, 2002 07:49:21 PM new
Emak,
Looked at Naxcom a few months ago, but just haven't made the time to start listing there. From what I remember, their FVF is a little high so it appeared that there would be a bit of a floor to the price that you sell a card. If I may ask, what range of cards are you selling on Naxcom and does there appear to be good activity? I liked the setup and I probably should move a good bit of my inventory to that site instead of wasting my time on a couple of the ones that I currently list.
Thanks for the info on half.com. Don't currently list there, but was thinking about starting. I'm now glad that I didn't start. Still is a little curious that they haven't posted the announcement on their board.
Tooltimes,
Can't disagree with you on the double listing. With the sell-through on most all third tier sites being quite low and even Ebay and Yahoo softening, a person really can double list and not take much of a chance of double selling if they are diligent with cancelling listings after the item sells. However I can imagine that a significant number of sellers are probably too lazy to cancel a sold listing thus creating the problems.
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emak
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posted on December 19, 2002 08:03:01 AM new
stave,
Most of my items have been in the $3 - $8 range. Activity is not robust by any means but it's not bad considering you list once and they remain until sold or cancelled.
Their FVF's are a bit high on the lower end. They actually adjusted those a few times recently to where they are a bit steep now. They do allow a fairly healthy shipping allowance though which helps cover most of that cost. You do also have a CC fee to pay if the bidder doesn't already have money in their holding account to pay for their item.
One thing I really don't like about the site is their is nothing done to encourage bidders to buy multiple items from a bidder. Unless I'm mistaken each individual item is given its own order number and charged a separate s/h fee. This helps to prop up the fees to the site a bit but sure doesn't encourage volume buying.
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tobyscards1
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posted on December 19, 2002 02:18:57 PM new
I have sold several thousand dollars of sportcards on half.com and have 4000 listed now. They are low cost items that I will not pay 30 cents to list. I have many low cost cards on BV with no sales in about a year. Comments or suggestions on where to post them?
tobyscards
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tooltimes
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posted on December 19, 2002 03:00:47 PM new
I was wondering where all those sportscards from Half.com were going to go. If not BV then where? Can't the Beckett site make any money off the low value cards?
I was ridiculous from ebay to even suggest their own site with a 30 cent minimum listing fee as an alternative to Half when the low value cards are all pulled off that site.
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stavecards
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posted on December 19, 2002 04:02:44 PM new
Tobycards1,
I'm not sure what value cards you are listing. If they are $3-4 book value cards, I would recommend trying Yahoo. I've done well listing cards that range from that value to about $20 book. It is slower right now than it has been in the past, but it definitely is much better than any other site that I have found. If the cards are not worth paying Yahoo's listing fee, don't really have a recommendation for you. Beckett would probably be the best alternative.
Tooltimes,
The majority of the decent cards on Half.com will probably go to Ebay or Yahoo. As for as the low cost ones, I have a hunch that a lot of them are already double listed on Bidville.
As far as Beckett, I'm not sure what is their strategy. In the past, they did almost no promotion of the selling part of the site. Lately they have started to promote the marketplace in the price guides. They have a hodgepodge of selling areas. They have a consignment auction area that is primarily geared toward the graded cards. They have an auction area but they charge a .25 listing fee plus FVF. They don't promote it and I don't think it gets enough traffic to warrant the high listing fee. Then they have two buy-sell areas. You list the cards at a price, but it is negotiable. One of the buy-sell areas is totally free, but you are limited to a 60 character description and no picture. The other buy-sell area is part of the My Collections area. You can develop a normal type listing, but the fees are a little high. They basically charge the same listing and FVF fees as Ebay, but the oddity is that you don't pay the listing fee until the card sells.
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robnzak
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posted on December 20, 2002 05:59:30 PM new
WOW!
a civil conversation. I wish I had something to contribute, but my entire sportscard collection consists of a Doug Radar card somewhere at the bottom of my underwear drawer.
carry on, Rob
robnzak - 1st editions
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tooltimes
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posted on December 20, 2002 07:43:55 PM new
The nickname for Doug Radar was 'the rooster' and the bottom of an underwear drawer sounds like the ideal place to store his card.
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kenzy
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posted on December 20, 2002 10:08:06 PM new
robnzak--
QUESTION: The clean underwear drawer, or the dirty underwear drawer?
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tooltimes
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posted on December 21, 2002 10:30:27 AM new
Trading Cards on Half.com and eBay
Dec 20, 2002 11:39 AM
Dear Half.com Members,
Effective December 20th, eBay will be the preferred venue for buying and selling trading cards. Consequently, Half.com will no longer be supporting the sale of trading cards on the site. If you are looking for that Cal Ripken, Jr. card. card to add to your collection or that rare Mickey Mantle card we encourage you to visit eBay's trading card category.
Remember, if you are registered on Half.com you are also registered on eBay. So you can bid on everything from antiques to xylophones on eBay with your Half.com and eBay username and password!
Best wishes,
The Half.com by eBay Team
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blairwitch
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posted on January 1, 2003 10:23:36 AM new
In the past week the number of cards on bidville has soared to record numbers. The site is almost 80% cards.
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happyjewls
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posted on January 2, 2003 03:04:55 PM new
This is really not a reply but a request for info. Happyjewls died, my partner and I have tons of postcards, collectables-milatary-Hawaiiana-you name it, mostly postcards. I have read to obtain info. taking to long. any suggestions on how to sell? Lots? In fact I found some quite amazing items. Just do not know where to start or sort out.
imqb
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